


Alternates

by daleyka



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Bodyswap, Character Study, F/M, I know bodyswap is ridiculous but I just had to know what it was like to write one, POV Kylo Ren, POV Rey (Star Wars), Plot, Redemption, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:54:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28114206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daleyka/pseuds/daleyka
Summary: Kylo Ren and Rey switch places. That's, um, it. (Set during The Last Jedi).
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 11
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

‘Shit,’ she says, looking at herself, her body – which is his body. ‘I – fuck.’

He blinks, and his eyelashes are delicate, fine things. They are hers. 

‘Rey,’ he says, and his voice is her voice. He tries to find himself , but everything is wrong. ‘Rey…’

She’s fading out. The connection between them is blinking away to nothing, not able to be sustained. Not sustainable now that they are not who they were. He looks so young, she thinks. Is that really how she looks when other people see her? It’s not how she feels. 

‘Where are you?’ he manages, but it’s her voice he can feel, sticking in his throat. ‘I mean, where is this?’

‘Luke,’ she says, incoherently, stumbling on the syllable, but fuck it, he understands that well enough. Luke means The Place that Luke Is. ‘You?’

‘Ship,’ he tells her. She looks – weird. Wrong. In his body, because she’s holding herself like a like a young girl. There are enemies on the ship. She’ll die if she looks like that: so shy and so hesitant. There where she is, hesitation is death. 

‘Choke,’ he says, trying to warn her, trying to give her one and only word of advice she needs, but she doesn’t understand what he’s saying, not yet anyway, because his face stares back at him, heedless, not understanding, still mired in the disgust they all have.

‘Don’t hurt,’ she answers, his voice quavering as she speaks it, which he supposes means ‘don’t hurt the people I’m with’. 

That’s all the time they get.  Her face fades away. His face. She can’t say which it is. Both. Neither. Whatever it was, he is gone, and she is alone. 

+

One of his hands is gloved in heavy leather. The other is bare. She is acutely aware of the sensation, over-focusing on it, numb to everything but that. It is surely a shock reaction, she thinks, this focus. The softness of the leather. The feel of the air on the other hand. The blood in his fingers. Their warmth. It helps her to feel it. The twitch of his middle finger as she holds it taut. 

Her body is wrong. Breathe in, breathe out. His breath comes differently to her own. She feels it rising in his chest. His heartbeat is rapid. 

Her fear; his body. His heart is hers, then. She is the one who can make it beat now.

She tries to lift his hand, and finds that it moves at her command. The movement stutters mid-air as she pauses. Fuck. She tries again, aware all the time of her breathing. In and out. Steady, regular. Survival. 

Where is she? This appears to be a room on a ship. No surprises there. She has assumed that whenever Ben talks to her, he is always on-board the base, somewhere near Snoke, floating malevolently at the edges of the galaxy in their ship that hides, like a large insect waiting on the ceiling, watching, biding its time. These are his quarters. There’s a bed and a series of closets and drawers in which, she supposes, his personal effects must be stored. 

There’s also a sort of table, or more like a plinth, on which, she notices, is a black mask, bent horribly out of shape. He has put it on a plinth so it is clearly an object of ceremony to him. It speaks of hatred. Something about it makes her think about evil. It radiates unkindness.

She approaches it, taking her first step in his body. She stumbles. His feet are heavier than hers. It takes a different degree of effort to lift them. She tries again, and manages to put his foot further, and then the next foot, and then  again the first. She walks his body towards the mask. 

It looks at her, as much as it can. There are eye sockets, she thinks, although the metal is fused together into a snarl. There is a definite sense of presence in the thing, which she doesn’t like at all.

_ Ben?  _ She thinks.  _ Luke?  _

Nothing answers her. Only the steady sounds of a ship in flight. The hum of an engine and the soft, endless whir of ventilation systems. She is very alone.

The mask is watching her through those melted-down eyes. She is aware of its gaze on her, the thought of making the hairs of her neck – his neck – stand up. Gingerly, she reaches out her gloved hand to the thing, not wanting to touch it with her bare skin. Not wanting to touch it at all. 

There seems to be a voice on the air, and it’s calling to him.  _ Ben _ , it seems to say. __ _ Come closer _ .

She knows that it’s madness, but she also knows that it is the mask who is talking to her now. Its voice is strange. Not a human voice, exactly. It feels somehow familiar, as if she might have heard it in a dream. 

Her hand reaches further towards it. The fabric of the glove touches. A sharp sensation, like an electric shock, runs through her. Rage, hatred, pain. Death. She thinks about all of these things and the thoughts are not her own, nor Ben’s, nor from anyone who still lives. 

Hardly knowing what she’s doing, she grasps at it, gripping it through one of those half-formed eyes with two of her fingers. Lifts it away from its plinth. Carries it, still stumbling on his steps, to one of the cupboards and throws it inside. The metal clinks on the floor. She shuts the door on it with a slam of her hand, too heavy, the movement misjudged. 

Breathing a sigh of  relief she looks around again. The mask’s presence seems less, even though there’s only a cupboard door between it and her. At least it’s not on the plinth anymore. The atmosphere feels a little cleaner for that.

The rest of the room is uninteresting as she looks around it, wondering if there’s anything here that can help her to understand Ben, or the First Order for that matter. He has a normal enough bed. The windows reveal nothing but the blackness and dullness of space. At the far end of the room, there is a comms unit that she doesn’t dare to operate, not wanting to call anyone’s attention. Who would she call here, and who knows how long she has before they return to their own bodies? Minutes? Seconds? It surely can’t last long, this out-of-body experience. It is really just a dream. 

She wanders the room. The rest of his cupboards at first glance contain nothing very sinister. His clothes, all of which are black and nearly identical. She assumes they are regulation clothes, a uniform of sorts. She is becoming more familiar with how to move his body, learning how to operate it as if it were a clunky machine that she must drive. His hand opens a drawer and the movement feels almost smooth. 

There, she notices that far to the back is a small stack of papers, slightly faded and discoloured. She pulls them out and lays them out on the top of the unit, scattering them.

There is his birth certificate, plastic-sealed and double stamped. Ben Solo. As clear as anything could be, his real name. Why has he kept it? For what does he need it now? The words startle her. She knows that Ben still exists, but it’s another thing to see him there, written down on the page like that, in black and white. A tangible person who was born, and who lived and lives. She hasn’t thought of him that way before. 

Another sealed and stamped form, listing his vaccinations and health checks from being a young child. Mandatory on Coruscant, as she’s heard it. Mandatory for a lot of children who grew up on luckier planets than hers. Ben was apparently given an excellent bill of health when he was seven, judging by this report. At the bottom of the page, his mother’s signature. Leia Organa. The letters swoop and curve around each other gracefully. Another thing he has kept that he doesn’t need; another thing she doesn’t understand.

Then there is a document written in a language she doesn’t speak. It’s hand-written, and it looks like someone’s notes, arrows connecting certain words together, a couple of scribbled out sentences. As she looks at it, she feels the same strange sensation as she had with the mask. There is an unsettling feeling of being watched by someone or something.

Another underneath it, written in the same handwriting – she supposes that it must be his own – but this time in Basic. He writes neatly but there are many words she doesn’t recognise, untranslated from some other language. It seems to be describing the locations and appearances of a series of planets. About halfway down he has written in the margin, with an arrow coming from it, ‘Ask Luke?’ 

This is from when he was a teenager then. From when he was studying under, or with, Luke. These are his notes.

The thought is strange. She has never really thought of Ben as the teenager he used to be either, the student. He has kept at least ten pages of these notes, bundled together. She looks through them idly, but there’s not much she can understand in there. They clearly pertain to the Jedi and his training and studying, but she doesn’t have the background to know what any of it means. They’re just words, transliterated she supposes, from whatever script the original document is in. 

Still, he was apparently meticulous enough to take his notes with him when he left all of that life behind, too. She finds that strange. Wasn’t he just telling her to let the past die? What sort of death is it, to keep it all in a drawer like this ? 

Rey feels calmer in his body now. The less she’s conscious of it not being her own body, the easier it seems to be to exist in it. While she was reading the notes, her breathing became unconscious. She hadn’t had to think too much about how to move. It had just happened. 

She takes another deep breath. She is him. His body. Her hand touches his face. His skin. There’s a faint, tiny hint of stubble on his chin. He must shave. She can’t imagine it, but she supposes he is a human man , when all is said and done. She puts her hand to his hair, running her fingers through it. It is very soft. 

She had wanted this. To touch him like this. 

The clock tells her it is 01:29. He must have been talking to her in the late night when the rest of the ship was sleeping. She has never asked him about anything like that. Their meetings have never been social enough for her to consider asking something like, ‘What time is it where you are?’ 

Does he sleep well? Does he sleep at all? She knows almost nothing about him. That is the truth: they have met a few times, all of them hostile, quick, and full of fury. She is in the body, in the life, of a man she doesn’t know the first thing about. Her breath, coming rapid now, is his. It’s his throat. His heart that is beating, that is creating the blood supply that ties her to life. She tries not to panic, but what good is that? She is dependent on someone else’s heart. Someone else’s lungs.  Of course she panics. 

She closes her eyes, hoping to meditate the way that Luke had showed her yesterday. She finds that she can access a strange sense of peace. There is a sudden clarity to her thought. The universe seems to be visible around her, held in careful balance, just as Luke said it would be. She can feel herself, Rey, within him. She is still who she is, thinking these thoughts, even if she is seeing with different eyes. This is only a body. It’s not more than that. The things that make her who she is are the same. She is a member of the Resistance; on board an enemy ship, camouflaged and safe inside this body. For as long as she is him, she is safe here. People do not kill Kylo Ren. 

The thought reassures her. Her eyes open.

Practice, she thinks. Everything is about practice. She has to learn this body, and quickly. She has to operate it so that it’s believably him. She has to touch it. She has to know it the way that he knows it, or near enough. Everything about it belongs to her now.

Her hand strokes his arm, gently at first. His own hand. The fingers are calloused, which is strange because he’s always gloved. She can feel the fine hairs of his arm. There’s so much of him to touch, and everything about him is – what's the word she would use for this body? For its edges, for its softness and its hardness? For the way he reflexively shudders when she traces a fine, soft line against his jaw? For the way that, when she runs her hand across his stomach, her own desire transforms into his? It feels like burning.

She’s never had a cock before, but she’s aware of what to do with one. To stroke it, to touch. The nerves are electric, ragged, as her hand – his hand - wraps around it so easily. 

Beautiful. His body is dangerous and it is beautiful.

+

There’s a noise outside, and he immediately turns towards it, senses overloaded. The Force is everywhere, and he can sense Luke, incredibly bright, like a light turned up too high, a torturer’s spotlight, intent on burning out hope. He can’t see anything else but that. He tries to sense beyond it, but everything is blocked. He feels out of control. He can’t  _ see _ . He doesn’t have his  saber . Panic rises in him – in her. 

Her body is tiny. He tries to move her hand, and finds that he moves it much too fast. He swings her arm so it careens wildly. Shit, shit. What is this? The body that he is in is not his own. He tries again, and manages to move her hand more steadily. It jolts, like a faulty signal, but it does move in the way that he intends a hand to move. 

He is breathing. Or she is breathing, he can’t say which and it strikes him that in this exact moment, the difference is irrelevant anyway. The body he occupies is taking in oxygen. He finds that reassuring. He focuses on it. Calm, regular breaths. He is not going to die, then. He is in the wrong form, but he is not going to die. If he is breathing, he is sustained. He can feel her heartbeat. It is rapid, but that’s due to him. He slows down further, to the edges of his limits, breathing carefully, like he learned. It helps. He can think somewhat clearly now, and what he thinks is this. One, he is alive. Two, he will continue to be alive for the foreseeable future, because Rey’s heartbeat is steady now and because she is young, agile, and powerful. Three, he is in the wrong body but in the right mind. He is exactly the person he was: Kylo Ren. Only the surface things have changed. 

He is sitting on the floor, as she had been; he tries to stand. Shakily, with a confused motion, he does it. He can support her weight, but it feels different to his own. Everything is different. Her hair, fuck it. He has long hair, knotted up high. There’s a weight to it. Her body, every part of it. He senses it all. The curves of her, the weight of her. The places where he could so easily -

This is a distraction, he tells himself. He focuses. Rey’s body is not the point. Desire is a weakness, and weakness is a luxury that people like him don’t have. The fact that he is  _ in _ Rey’s body is the point. 

It is just like back when he was first with Snoke. He’s learned some things about how to work beyond bodily discomfort. In the end, there’s only one answer: surviving through it.  So he stands and forces himself to stand up even straighter still, almost rigid. He puts full weight on both her legs. She doesn’t collapse after all. The body holds. Good. 

He steps forward, projecting confidence and calm, just as he has been trained. She walks.  One foot lands on the ground in front of him. Feels the solidity of the earth. The other foot. It feels terrifyingly strange, but he does it. He walks. His hand reaches for her  saber . It was never really hers. It belongs to his family. In his hand, the metal hilt is cool and reassuring. It makes him feel purposeful, to have it there. Clarity of mind comes from power, and this  saber represents, and is, power. There are things he is supposed to do. He has a destiny. 

Using the Force, he tries to sense again. Luke is still there, burning bright. Other things too now. Wherever she is, it is a place of power. He can feel all of it. Light and dark, eddying, swirling around him. His senses keen to it. He can sense intention. Someone is coming here, to find Rey. In a moment -

The door opens then, and in walks a man he has not seen in more than ten years. Older, slightly stooped, his uncle Luke. He is shaggier, with a large beard, and his hair is greyer. His face is more lined. Ben takes him in, with a certain shock. When did Luke become like this? So grizzled, grim and old. He looks unkempt. 

‘Rey?’ he says, sounding worried but also indefinably pissed-off. ‘I sensed a disturbance. What’s going on here?’

His voice is the same, then. Just as annoying as it ever was.  _ Enemy _ , Ben thinks, anger fizzling up inside of him.  _ Enemy.  _ The shock mutates to rage in a second and he doesn’t have to even think about it. He’s going to do what he’s wanted to do for so long and who cares if it’s Rey’s body he does it from? 

Her  saber –  _ his _ \- is in his hand, activated, and, without a moment’s pause, he throws it at Luke, intending to kill him. This is an opportunity he can’t afford to miss. It takes him a lot of strength to handle her body, to force her muscles to comply with his intent, but he does it. There is nothing that Kylo Ren cannot do. 

The  saber flies swift and true, its blade hurtling fast towards Luke, on whose face is an expression of absolute, stunned surprise. Ben’s power is not inconsiderable, and even in Rey’s body, his control is trained. If he throws a  saber , it doesn’t miss.


	2. Chapter 2

He sees the blade flying through the air, almost at his uncle’s heart. It is perfectly thrown, directed to kill. It never reaches. Luke’s hand steadies it, holding it back. Another millimeter and he would have been dead. There’s a smell of scorched fabric, where the saber has cut through the cloth of his tunic.

‘What the fuck?’ Luke says, horrified, even as he is grabbing the hilt, pulling the saber away from him.

Ben doesn’t answer. He’s still feeling shaky. Everything is wrong. He has to keep her body upright. If he loses control in front of Luke, he’ll know immediately that something is wrong. He’ll work it out. Ben concentrates on standing extremely still, using a lot of his energy to do it. 

‘Rey,’ Luke says, a little more anger in his tone. ‘Two things.’

He takes a step closer.

‘One, do not ever do that again. And two, do not ever throw your saber at anyone. Not in a fight, not for any reason. Keep it with you always.’

He pauses.

‘Three, actually. There is a third: I want you to tell me right now, what the fuck just happened?’

He takes another step closer. Ben stares at him. He’s raised Rey’s arm, as if to fight, but he’s not that stupid: Luke’s too strong and he’s too weak. At least for now, like this, standing face to face. If Skywalker turned his back, it’d be different. It’d be a clean kill then. Besides:

‘You don’t swear,’ he manages to say, which is a stupid comment but he’s not feeling exactly 100% his best. His voice comes out more or less as Rey’s, which is a relief, although it’s also extremely unsettling, to hear her voice in his throat. ‘Jedi don’t swear.’

Luke looks confused. He’s still holding the saber, loose at his side.

‘What’s that got do with anything? Who told you that?’

‘Han,’ Ben tries, since he can hardly say _you_ _did, fifteen years ago._ Luke’s expression darkens.

‘Old news, kid.’

‘What?’

‘And anyway,’ Luke adds, ignoring this. ‘That’s not what we’re discussing. Rey, why did you throw your saber at me?’

‘Wanted to,’ Ben tells him, somewhat inarticulately. Rey’s voice makes it sound childish where it would be threatening if he said it, and his uncle raises his eyebrows.

‘You okay there?’ he asks, looking at him. ‘You’re shaking.’

‘Fine.’

He senses Luke, trying to read his intentions. His uncle’s presence in his mind is curious and watchful. Absolutely not. Luke isn’t prying into his mind like a fucking creep. Not these days; not ever again. He bats him away, pushing him out of his mind none-too-kindly.

‘Huh,’ Luke says, sensing this. He pauses, thinking. ‘Rey. Was Kylo Ren here? I could sense something. A darkness. It felt like him. Did he – did he ask you to hurt me? Did he make you?’

‘Make?’ Ben repeats, tone very cold, the anger running through him giving him a renewed push of strength. ‘I don’t let people make me do things.’

Luke raises his eyebrows slightly at this, presumably because coming from a young woman who only learned about the Force a few months ago, it sounds a bit different to how it might if it came from Ben. Everything is different for Rey.

‘He’s pretty strong. He has the capacity to control people. I can’t sense him now in you, but if that’s what happened, I need to know.’

Ha fucking ha. Can’t sense him now! Ben would laugh, if he had the capacity for it. Instead, he keeps Rey’s face as blank as he can, thinking fast.

The options strike him as suboptimal. He’s not strong enough yet in Rey’s body to kill Luke. And his uncle’s not an idiot. He’ll be watchful now, if he thinks there’s a chance of danger, which there obviously is if someone’s just a flung a saber at your heart. Ben needs to get out of here fast, which he can’t do if Luke’s watching him, half-suspicious that he’s possessed by the malign spirit of Kylo Ren, particularly when he _is_ in fact Kylo Ren.

So:

‘Yeah,’ he says, hoping it comes out nervously in Rey’s voice. ‘He was here, and he told me about – your temple. He made me feel angry about what you did.’

Luke’s face is controlled, impassive, but Ben knows him very well, or used to know him very well anyway. He can see a shadow of emotion there.

‘I’m sure you heard it differently to how I’d tell it.’

‘I’m sure I did.’

‘Get some sleep,’ Luke says, ending this, but not unkindly, perhaps seeing that Ben is leaning against the wall for support of her body, although he’s trying to not show it, because he doesn’t show weakness. ‘It’s late and Kylo Ren won’t come back tonight. We’ve only got two more days together, Rey. Don’t waste it.’

‘Two days?’

‘That’s what I offered you. I’d train you for three days. You know that was the deal.’

‘In … three days,’ Ben repeats, not understanding. ‘It should take ten years. You’re not serious.’

‘We’ll talk about it in the morning.’ Luke’s face is very closed. ‘The answer won’t change but if you want to waste your time arguing it, that’s your problem. And don’t even think about throwing another saber at me.’

With which he walks away, the door slamming to a close. Ben is alone, and he’s grateful for that, mostly because he can collapse to the bed to lie down. He breathes deeply. Lying down is easier. No muscles to learn how to move. Less chance of giving her body a heart attack because he’s so angry. Three days! He’s actually offended on Rey’s behalf at the offer, an emotion he would usually take out on someone by murdering them. How can she just have accepted that?

Maybe she didn’t know it was an offensive offer. After all, she’s not him. She didn’t grow up in a family who all this for granted, who naturally assumed you need to spend a decade and more learning how to harness your power. Maybe she thinks three days is good enough for her. Was she even grateful for it? That thought makes him angrier still.

It’s so quiet here, he realises, as he lies there, totally spent; that’s one of the things that’s bothering him. There’s no engine noise, nor humming of ventilation, nor clanking of soldiers’ feet, nor service droids, nor any of it. He hates the quiet. Too much space, too much possibility to think. This is an island in the middle of fucking nowhere. Even as he thinks this, if it doesn’t begin to rain outside, and more than just rain: it’s pouring down. The lashing water against the roof of the shithole hut is at least some noise, some distraction. He listens to it, trying to breathe in and out consciously, to calm her down. Her heart rate is uneven. He can feel it jittering in her chest.

Someone else’s heart is keeping him alive. His mind loops around the facts, as best it can. He is Rey, apparently in such a way that not even Luke can sense the difference between them now. And she is him, so she’s the one in the middle of the First Order right now. A dangerous place for him; more dangerous still for her. It’d be ironic if Snoke summoned him and she went along in his stead and then got him murdered. What would happen to him, the consciousness trapped in her body, then? Would he be expelled from her body and just dead? Or would she be dead in his body? Or dead in her own body? 

This thought does not relax him one bit. It makes his insides curl up with stress, like he’s going to throw up. The risks to him here on this island are nil, as he seriously doubts Luke’s going to turn his talents to murder anytime soon. The risks to her there are myriad and obvious. There’s Snoke, problem one. There’s Hux, problem two. There’s everyone on board, problem three. He is a hated man. She can have no idea how to behave in that kind of situation. Ben himself walks it as a tightrope. He is always conscious of risk, and of power.

What is she doing right now? She might be trying to damage the ship, or do some noble Resistance thing; he wouldn’t be surprised by that. Another problem: even if she doesn’t die, she can seriously fuck over his reputation. All she has to do is look a bit contrite and pure and say, ‘Ben Solo’s back’ and then everything his enemies have ever believed about him is true.

Calm. He tries for it, but fails to reach it. Her heart’s still jittering, and he stands up, even though it hurts to move her body. He has to get out of here, and back to where she is and where he belongs. Not for her sake, but for his own. He’d strongly prefer his body not to wind up thrown up in the incinerator along with all the others.

This thought really doesn’t help either. He’s staggered outside now, the rain soaking him to the skin. _Ship._ He needs a ship, and any will do. He looks around, although the visibility’s terrible because of the rain and he doesn’t know where the hell he is, geographically speaking, on this island, or how big it is anyway, or where she would have put a ship, because he _can’t see_ , and he finds it hard to judge distance in her body too _._ A single step is less for her than him. Everything is confusing, and her heart’s really racing now.

Maybe he will kill her after all. He didn’t manage it in the forest, perhaps didn’t even really want to, but he might be able to do so now. Maybe her body can’t cope with the kind of stress his can cope with, being unaccustomed to this kind of fear.

He swears, and in Rey’s voice, the words somehow sound even worse. He tries to use the Force, but he doesn’t know for what because it’s not magic, and it can’t make the world light when the sun has set, nor make you dry when you’re freezing cold and wet, nor return you to your body, nor as it happens, can it fix a single one of your actual problems. This thought fills him with panic, although he just keeps walking forward, despite not knowing what this forward goes towards. 

‘Rey,’ he hears, coming from somewhere nearby. He turns his head, to see Luke, his face covered by a hood, moving _very fast_ towards him. Faster than Ben would have assumed his uncle could move. He’d like to throw a saber at him again, but he only had the one, and anyway –

‘What are you doing?’ Luke says, approaching, sounding irritable. ‘Both here in the rain, and with the Force? What the hell?’

Ben’s done with it. Wise or unwise, he tries to reach out now, to choke Luke. That’s something the Force can _always_ do. The malevolent energy he carries is released all at once: Luke’s gasping for breath, and Ben raises his hand, tightening his grip. It’s all so easy. There’s nothing to think about – he has a problem, and here is the solution.

‘Ben,’ Luke says, resisting this, raising his own hand, and he starts at his own name. ‘Kylo Ren, whatever the fuck you want to call yourself.’ He sounds furious. ‘Get out of her head. Get out of my life.’

Then there’s a violent push of energy, which Ben can’t hold back, and he can feel himself – her body – falling. He tries to steady it, but there’s no help for it: he does fall, hard onto the earth. He winces at the pain: he’s not landed right, not at all. He landed as if it were his own body. Has he broken something? He certainly can’t stand – it was already hard, and this has made it impossible. Fuck but his uncle is strong; much too strong, stronger even than -

‘Rey?’ Luke says, sounding a bit tremulous. ‘Is that you?’

A ragged out-breath.

‘I need to know.’ His uncle’s voice is resonant, so he must be using the Force, amplifying it, threading it through with power. ‘I need to know that’s you, Rey.’

There’s no way out of this; not like this, anyway. He can’t be himself in her body. Her options aren’t his options.

‘Yes,’ Ben says, untruthfully. He tries to make his voice a bit closer to Rey’s: younger, _nicer_ , and lighter than he ever was. He blinks her eyelids, puts her hand to her face to wipe away some of the rain. Uses a word he hasn’t used in a long time: ‘Thanks, Luke. I think. But what happened? Why am I on the floor?’


End file.
